I've moved this thread back to the top and shortened the name so I can post this where some of our non-member participants can chime in.

A couple of days ago I wasn't paying attention to what the content was when one of the very long posts about a sea shanties with a slavery topic was posted on Facebook by someone who has been studying them but is a non-American English-as-a-second-language speaker. He also posts here on Mudcat, but sometimes the performances videos appear on Facebook. The nuance of that particular song is one that is understood as racist here in the US; the language may have not have the same weight to UK scholars, especially those whose first language isn't English where idiomatic phrases can trip one up. I'm trying to be generous here in saying the interpretation outside the US may not render the words as damaging.

The trouble with that post was that it was an old song that inserted a lot of racist and derogatory language and demeanor in the Facebook milieu. I started seeing remarks about it and went back to take a look, then decided to remove that post over on Facebook.

The difference between posting historic songs on Mudcat.org and posting historic songs on Facebook.com is that Max Spiegel owns Mudcat and it's a source for music scholarship. The nasty lyrics generally stay put in the music section as a matter of record. Over on Facebook, those "community standards" are monitored by computer algorithm and humans and if you get many complaints about language over there, you as members can get your posts deleted, you can get your personal account closed down for a little while, or you can get your personal account closed for weeks at a time. (Facebook Jail.) People love to complain, and over on Facebook there are lots of tools for doing so. Groups and pages can get dinged (they have some kind of point system) if too many complaints appear.

We have that Mudcat Café Facebook page set up for announcements, and while links to images and video can easily be posted here at Mudcat, if you want to see photos or videos you have to visit another site. These days the main places people link to are personal websites, YouTube accounts, or Facebook accounts, groups, and pages.

People visit that page and try to do a quick question about a song and users oblige with answers, but they're lost on Facebook. That's why they are directed back over here to Mudcat to do their research. You're less likely to run into trouble and much more likely to find the answers already exist over here, or people who will quickly jump in to help. And then it's part of the record here.

Keeping the musical scholarship here on Mudcat is the best way to keep track of your work.